


Play Too Rough

by ToothPasteCanyon (DannyFenton123)



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Falling Star (Gravity Falls), Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), F/M, Werewolves (minor role with no tf)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 23:51:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19187749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DannyFenton123/pseuds/ToothPasteCanyon
Summary: Mabel meets and falls in love with Henry. He finds someone to accept him for who he is and draw him out of his shell, she finds someone to ground her and maybe stop her from completely destroying the universe every once in a while.Based on chokingonfeeling's Falling Star AU, and related works by Seiya234.





	Play Too Rough

**Author's Note:**

> I am falling deeper into the rabbithole every day and writing an AU of Transcendence AU. I would highly recommend you read Seiya's works for the Falling Star AU; that's what got me interested in this concept! It's basically what would happen if Mabel also got a bunch of fun powers from the Transcendence too.
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/5267120

                     Mabel had never been the normal one. When she was younger, she used to fill her arms with slap bracelets until she could barely bend her elbows. She knitted sweaters every colour of the rainbow and stuck chips to her ears to pretend she had earrings. She had all kinds of crushes – from the man on the ten dollar note to a snobby sock puppeteer – and she pursued every one with a passion that was genuine, relentless…

                     Weird.

                     Weird was a word that had followed Mabel all through her life, and she had mixed feelings about it.

                     “You’re so weird, Mabel.”

                     She’d always tried to embrace it.

                     “Why, thank you! I try.”

                     But…

                     “You’re not funny, Mabel.”

                     “You need to grow up, Mabel.”

                     “Why can’t you be more like your brother, Mabel?”

                     “Go away, Mabel.”

                     Sometimes, she wished she could fit in a bit more. Sometimes, when it seemed the whole world was looking down on her, when even her parents gave her a tired sigh and a, “Well, that wasn’t nice, but…”, when she was cowering in sweater town and her brother wasn’t back from chess club yet, she wondered if she could stuff it all down.

                     Stash away her knitting needles. Tone down her smile. Stop putting her big, weird heart out there to get broken time and time again, and be _normal_.

                     Maybe she could do that… or maybe she couldn’t. Who knows?

                     Then the Transcendence happened, and she knew for sure.

                     (She knew so many things for sure.)

                     She couldn’t be the normal one. Being normal was pretending Dipper didn’t exist. Being normal was staying silent when that pro-nat speaker came to her school. Being normal was hurtful; being normal was _wrong_.

                     And being normal was a lie. Because Mabel Pines was fundamentally, essentially, absolutely, _not normal._

                     Oh, people started to treat her as the normal one, if only because Dipper had turned into a literal demon. When he was making the walls bleed or sticking forks in his arms and letting the gold flow, people would turn to her just like they used to turn to her brother. But if he’d gotten weird, she’d gotten weirder.

                     If he broke the laws of reality, she stopped being bound to them.

                     The universe had become Mabel’s plaything. She could do _anything_ ; if she so wanted, she could take the very fabric of spacetime and knit it into a sweater. It’d be a pretty sweater too, so many glittering stars… ooh, she could-

                     She couldn’t.

                     (She wouldn’t, more like.)

                     The universe was her plaything, and what a fascinating toy it was. It reminded her of those fancy dolls her grandmother used to get her every birthday. They were stiff, and a bit creepy, and she could play with each one for only a little before her mother would take it away and put it back in its container.

                     “We’re going to put her somewhere nice now, okay? You’ll break her if you play too rough.”

                     Mabel would see the dolls at her grandmother’s house, locked up in a glass cabinet. She’d stare at them, and they’d stare back at her with their glassy eyes, taunting her with their forbiddenness.

                     “You’ll break her if you play too rough.”

                     Mabel would stare at the universe, and all its pretty stars and swirling galaxies, so vast, so fun, so fragile.

 _You’ll break her if you play too rough_.

* * *

 

 _You’ll break him, too_.

                     In some ways, Mabel had been changed. She had been one, and now she was two, and a fire bubbled beneath her skin and came out in all sorts of weird ways.

                     In other ways, she was still the same girl she’d been before the Transcendence. She still knit sweaters, she still cracked jokes, she still loved to cuddle up with her Grunkle Stan and a bucket of popcorn and ‘ironically’ watch _The Duchess Approves_ until the sun came up the next morning.

                     She was still the same about crushes. She had them all through highschool, and they were all equally interesting: there was the guy who wrote her a poem in English class (“It’s a partnered assignment, Mabel. He had to do it.” “It’s so romantic!”) The woman on the pound note an English tourist accidentally paid with (‘That’s the Queen of England, Mabel. She’s, like, a hundred years old.” “A hundred years old and she still looks this good?”) a vampire (“Yes, finally!” “I think he’s even older than the Queen. Why’s he still in highschool?”) and so many, many more.

                     Mabel put her heart and soul into pursuing every one of them. Even if all she got out of it was a funny story about filling her crush’s bedroom with cotton candy after they called her a weirdo, it was still fun. Harmless fun. This was what highschool was all about, right?

                     That was until she met him.

                     Destin.

                     He was, in a word, cool. He had his own car. He was a werewolf - and coming fresh out of a relationship with some jerk vampire who didn’t like Dipper that was _very_ cool. He was also one year older than her, so he was actually in his gap year when they went to prom and she had to sign that ‘non-student permission slip’ for him to get in.

                     Dipper super side-eyed Destin when Mabel brought him home, but he wasn’t just superficially cool, you know? He was actually cool, too: he didn’t freak out when she talked to Dipper out of nowhere, and he barely blinked an eye when he got summoned to the dinner table - just a, “Oh, hey, Dipper! Nice to finally meet you, dude” and everyone’s jaw _dropped_ . Also he was super interested in camping and hiking and all that outdoorsy, survivalist stuff; he wasn’t really sure how to turn it into a career, but he was _passionate_ about it, and she loved listening to him talk about the things he loved.

                     Sitting under the stars, she could listen to him for hours. He was wonderful… and maybe that was the worst part.

 _You’ll break him, too_.

                     Because when it all fell apart, that meant she couldn’t laugh it off, couldn’t blame it on some jerk calling her a weirdo or being mean to her brother. That meant was her fault.

                     That meant her fun wasn’t harmless.


End file.
